Yeah, this is turning into one of those blogs

Time for a chicken update people. We butchered one of the three roosters the Sunday before Thanksgiving, and Christina's Granny used it to make homemade chicken and noodles. Very delicious. The offspring of the mother hen have also started laying eggs, and we have been getting 2 or 3 every day instead of just one. On Sunday, there was a total of 5 eggs, which is the current record for eggs in a day. The heaviest egg we had so far weighed 68g. That's officially an extra large egg. But it's not all fun and games. One night, when I went to close up the house, all the chickens, except two, were not in their house, but sitting under a lean-to by our barn on a bale of straw. They were fast asleep and were not going to move for anything. So I had to pick them up one by one and carry them into their house. The two remaining roosters put up a little more resistance and were more awake, but we eventually managed to get them into the house, not without the two of them getting into a fight in the barn. Last night, when we came home from visiting Christina's parents, they were all still inside the barn, awake and lively at least. I half expected this to happen, since it was a dark and rainy day, and I left the light on inside the barn, so they would have a dry and well-lit place for the day. It wasn't too much effort to get them to go into the house that time. On top of that, they have taken a liking to coming up to the house and scratching mulch and rocks from the flower bed onto the lawn, but it's pretty easy to have them follow me back to their designated area by breaking a heel of a bread into little pieces, calling them and feeding them the bread. Now they even come just when I call them, though with more hesitation.

Sleeping Beauty

Yes, this thing is still on. The bad news first. I saw this on Boing Boing and though it was really lame. Sure, it gets a short giggle, but to me the comparison really does not work at all.

The good news is that even though I am not keeping up with the skateboarding world very much these days, this little video is freaking awesome.

BIG news!

Who of you thinks they have more than enough online accounts? I definitely do, and I don't see them getting any less. I certainly don't keep track of all of them, and created some just to check out something or to take advantage of some one-time type thing. So who knows how many I really have and how many have been orphaned. But do I really need an account that collects all my chat accounts? I fail to see the point, and don't like having to trust a company with my collected information in that way. And where will it end? Another account to collect my e-mail accounts? One for the different shopping sites? And then one to keep all of those account-keeping accounts in.

That's why, after realizing that you have to have an Astra account with the latest version of Trillian, which I neither want nor need and prefer to make a decision about autonomously, I decided to switch to Pidgin. And I like it.

Also, this is funny:

Früher war alles besser

Internet, I have a confession to make: I still buy CDs. Go ahead, laugh at my old-fashioned ways. You know what else? I have never bought music in a non-physical format, either. I have downloaded a handful of songs via file-sharing several years ago, but my main purpose there was to discover new music. I can easily do that with the help of myspace, official band websites, free custom radio services and various internet music stores these days, so no more need for me to participate in file-sharing. Because I do believe that it's wrong to become to possess music without paying for it. But anyway, what I really want to talk about is the devaluation of music. And by that I don't really mean the fact that a lot of music is being illegally acquired by listeners, but to a much larger extent the way in which music is being listened to and consumed, and not always appreciated consciously.

I've been trying to figure out the root cause of this devaluation, but I think that it's just a matter of perception. As in I perceive there to be a devaluation, but it probably is not really happening. It's just that people now have the means to listen to and acquire music in a way that best fits their listening habits. Personally, I like to listen to whole albums and focus on the music, immersing myself in it as much as I can. I don't like listening to music I don't know in the background. I don't listen to music on my commute because the noise and all the people are too distracting. I usually have a song in my head that I'm whistling actually.

But enough about me. I think that a lot of other people, maybe even the majority of them, are happy with listening to just single songs, and mixing up their favorites while doing so. They're the ones with the iPods etc. Now when CDs and records were your only option, singles were a very cost-ineffective way of buying music, because albums had a lot more songs on them, and cost less to buy per song. For example, back in the days, a CD single was about 10 Deutsche Mark, and album about 30. So if you bought 3 singles, you'd have about 6 songs, and usually 3 of them were just filler or a remix or something, depending on what kind of music it was. If you got the album, you got at least ten songs most of the time, with a good chance that there is some more enjoyable stuff on there. With the current MP3 pricing structure, there is only a very slight advantage to buying a whole album, if there is one at all.

Does this lead to musicians becoming more song-oriented and moving away from things like creating coherent song collections, arranging the songs on an album in a structured way or even concept albums? Who the heck knows? I think most popular-type music has always been song-oriented. And I don't want to start a debate about whether this is because people naturally respond to and enjoy that kind of format for music, whether it's just out of convenience, or whether it is a result of the song format being pushed on people through various marketing channels. That's irrelevant and I'd be talking to myself anyway.

Follow the followers

Judging from our site visit statistics, not a whole lot of people even noticed, but I've been making some tweaks to the layout. My goal was to upgrade to the Blogger widget layout, which I have been putting off for way too long, but no matter what I tried, I just can't get the script to work that writes the different taglines under the title. The main reason I wanted to update were the labels list, which I now realize is not near as cool as I thought, and also the collapsible archive links, which I somewhat remedied by moving all those links down in the sidebar so they're not so much in the way. And Maria, thanks for subscribing to the feed while the new layout was up, but I'm not sure it will work anymore. Sorry. I did add a link to the atom feed so people can get automatic updates if they want.

The only thing that really changed is that I set the width of the sidebar and posts area to a fixed number instead of a percentage. I remembered that viewing the blog on a widescreen monitor was causing super-long lines that are hard to read. And since most new monitors are widescreen these days, I figured it was time to get with the program. Links are no longer underlined. No one does that anymore.

I have to admit it's getting better...

As you may have noticed, I have been faithfully adding labels to my posts. I did this in hopes of taking the time one day to update to the new Blogger "layouts" instead of using this old template, and then being able to have the labels in the sidebar. I played around a little and it seems that adding your own javascript isn't working. Or at least the script I'm adding isn't working. Which sucks, cause I really like the quotes under our blog title, and that's done by a script. So dear Blogger bots or whoever at Blogger that's reading this: Why isn't my javascript working? I know I should probably use the Google group, but I'm way to lazy (too lazy for the extra 'o' as well), I mean busy for that. So I'll have to hold out on adding any fancy stuff and keep using regular style and html elements. I might like that better anyway.

And while we're talking about "improvements" (that means I don't really think anything's improving, not that I wanted to emphasize the word and should have used bold, italics or underlining, I've been noticing that, as in: Secaucus - a town that takes "pride", hilarious), maybe some of you have heard the latest already, but all broadcast TV in the US will be digital starting February 17, 2009. That's why you keep coming back here, the insider information. And you know how those commercials are like "Have you noticed how digital has made everything better"? Well, I'm not entirely convinced. Satellite TV is digital, and whenever the weather gets little crappy, you can't watch that stuff anymore. Cause instead of the picture being fuzzy or static, you end up with this copped up stuff you can't watch at all anymore. You know what I'm talking about, right? Raise your hand if you don't, cause that stuff put a serious damper on my EURO finals viewing experience. Another reason I dislike DirecTV and the likes, you pay a monthly fee for TV, and when the weather's bad, and you'd wanna stay inside and, oh, I don't know, watch a little TV maybe, why not, weather is nasty anyway, you can't, cause the picture's gone and the sounds all messed up. So in the future, when a storm's a-brewing somewhere, and people would like to keep updated on it's development, even if it's static, they won't be able to do that with a digital broadcast, cause digital has no gray zone, it only knows 0 or 1, on or off.

But enough ranting, especially when it's so incoherent. The bottom line is, I don't think digital broadcasting is all it's cracked up to be, and I'm waaaay awesome because I listen to vinyl records.